by Jenn Thorson
“Very nice, P.G.s,” said Zlotni. “This here is a momentous day for us, and we should be real proud. Through the installation of this advanced prisoner confinement system, we’ve just taken another big step into the Greater Communicating Universe.” He moved towards the cells and peered through the bars at Bertram, shiny black eyes in a determined scaly face. “All locked up and comfy? Don’t worry, we won’t forget about ya in here. When Tsmorlood wakes up, you can just let him know that we’ve called some old buddies of his to come and see him.”
With a final satisfied glance at the bright red light, Zlotni turned and motioned the Peace Guards out of view. Down the corridor, the door clanged shut.
“Bleedin’ Karnax, I thought they’d never leave,” came Rollie’s voice from somewhere inside the cell. A cot creaked. “Stunning sure is blasted hard on you Tryflings, innit? Wasn’t even much of a hit they gave us, and you look chewed up and processed.”
“You’re …” Bertram forced his mouth to form words. It was easier now than the first time he’d been stunned, but it still sounded as if he were talking through paste. “I thought you were still out cold,” said Bertram.
“Good,” Rollie responded. He was standing by the bars now, trying to peer down the hall. “So how many? How many, do you s’pose? I heard three. Figure three Guards, and possibly more out front. Think this is the only passage in?”
Bertram began the struggle to prop himself up against the wall.
Rollie waved a hand absently at him. “No, no, don’t strain yourself, we’ve time.”
“For what? What do we have time for?”
Arms folded, Rollie gave a critical survey of the concrete ceiling. “Before the Deltan RegForce get here, of course.”
Bertram sagged back against the pillow. “Refresh my memory?”
“Law enforcement. From Hyphiz Delta. My home planet.”
Bertram rubbed half-numb fingers across his half-numb face. A trickle of drool curled from the corner of his mouth. “The ‘old buddies.’”
“Sounds like they’re being notified, if they haven’t been already. All depends on if these local boys have learned to work the vis-u yet.” Rollie glanced at the red light in the corridor and sniffed. “If they’ve got a vis-u.”
Bertram peered through the mental fog. “So you’re saying, you’re still wanted back home, and I’m imprisoned here for, what, color commentary?”
“’Course not,” Rollie said, examining the door’s hinges, “you’re an accessory.”
“An accessory! To what? How am I accessorizing when you kidnapped me?”
“Well, that’s hardly common knowledge, is it?” Rollie told him. “Ludlow, don’t you understand? When we left Rhobux-7, the Seers didn’t blank my archive. They didn’t tell anyone they’d let me off. In the eyes of every law enforcement outfit in the fragging GCU, I am an escapee and you are an accomplice.”
Bertram swallowed, feeling flushed, his stomach rolling from the heavy pulse that drummed behind his eyes. “But why would the Seers do that? It’s a little extreme just because they can’t get anyone else for kitchen detail, don’t you think?”
“Better,” Rollie corrected. “They can’t get anyone better for kitchen detail.” He peered at the heavy iron lock in the cell door. “But it doesn’t matter. I won’t be sent to Rhobux-7 for this one.”
“That’s right, the Seers said Altair,” Bertram recalled. “Isn’t that a star?”
“Altair-5, and it’s a planet off that star.” Rollie paced in front of the bars with nervous energy.
“Not exactly a day spa, I gathered.”
Rollie stopped in mid-stride and faced Bertram, his expression drawn and tense. “Hyphiz Deltan parents tell their progeny if they misbehave, they’ll be sent to Altair-5 to work the tarpits. It’s blisteringly hot, shelterless, completely uninhabited, and infested with 4,000 of the most dangerous, ravenous, and eye-poppingly hideous examples of flora and fauna in the entire cosmos. Consider it my culture’s equivalent of your Hell. Only this place has coordinates.”
Bertram Ludlow grimaced and closed his eyes. His head felt better without the light, actually. It was easier to concentrate. “Do you think the Seers might’ve just made a mistake? An oversight, about the charges? I mean, maybe they didn’t get around to it in time. Didn’t realize it’d come to this.”
“If they’re to be believed, they maintain the lines of Fate, Ludlow. I’d say that’s pretty tapped in to current events, wouldn’t you?”
“Valid point,” said Bertram. He swung the cot’s pillow over his face as an added barrier to light. It smelled like sweat and some alien hair treatment, but he was past caring now. The blackness was soothing. He wondered if there were any GCU analgesics tailored to stun-gun migraines.
“You know,” Bertram reflected, “just this week I was thinking how with my Ph.D. almost wrapped up, a research position ahead of me, and an amazing girl who actually seemed to like me, things were really looking good. Soon I could afford to expand my culinary horizons outside of the ramen genre. I was even planning to get an apartment above basement level; someplace where the holes in the walls, and around the windows, weren’t spackled in with toothpaste. I was really looking forward to that. The windows bubble when it rains.” He recalled too vividly the thin rivulets of minty water, trickling down the wall onto the green shag carpet. At least it smelled good.
“Yep, the Good Life was just about to kick in for ol’ Bertram Ludlow,” he went on wistfully. “I’d worked hard, made sacrifices, and the payoff was coming. But then that knock came at my door. Was it Opportunity knocking? Opportunity pounding, and I was lucky enough to be home? Nope. It was Delusion, dressed like a steampunk funeral guest.” The stink of the pillow was getting to be too powerful. He tossed it off, coughing, and looked at the socked feet that lay splayed out before him. He’d never even gotten to grab his sneakers. The socks were dirty and worn through at the heel and toe. Bits of sand from Rhobux-7 had gotten crusted in, along with spilled drinks from the Podunk bar and a hundred other residues. “Now there are more holes than ever.”
Rollie, he noticed, was stepping back into the cell, sliding the barred door behind him. “Should look into a pair of decent boots, then, if you aim to save your planet, yeah?” the alien suggested pleasantly.
Bertram looked at the bars. He looked at Rollie. “Where did you just come from?”
Rollie hooked his oddly-bent thumb toward the hallway. “Just the three of them out there, far as I can tell. And I located the vis-u.” His face lit with amusement. “Bought some cheap do-it-yourself job and they’ve parts of it spread across the room. Best of all, they were sent the assembly instructions on video chip, which they can’t read because they haven’t got a video decryption device except for the vis-u. Stellar stuff.”
“But the light.” Bertram pointed at the red light in the ceiling. “The alarm, the Klinko Whatsis Confinement System …”
“Not on,” Rollie said.
Bertram blinked. “Seriously?”
“Never was. The directions were wrong. Red is green. Green is red.”
Bertram’s mind glazed over. Green was red, red was green …
Rollie exhaled impatiently. “Red can’t mean the thing is armed, Ludlow. In the Klinko star system, red is a color symbolizing welcome, contentment, emotional warmth, a new beginning. Never a color of warning.”
“And green?”
“Shade of their entrails,” Rollie answered. “Also panic, pain and, understandably, a pretty grisly death. Our Peace Guards seem to have overlooked that rather obvious point.”
“Geez, the oversight,” Bertram muttered.
Rollie sat down on one of the cots and turned his attention to the sole of his boot. “Should’ve got more intelligence on the species they buy from, is all. Common mistake in the GCU. We all rely too much on Translachew to do our work for us.” Rollie slid something on the side of the boot’s sole, and then began to twist off the heavy-treaded heel. “Life-forms blindly ass
ume that intergalactic communication is just the same as intergalactic understanding. It’s easier that way. Then we end up going to war over some grave cultural insult that we’re all just so very surprised about.” He slid back a panel and removed what looked to be a black polymer cylinder of about three inches long from a hollowed-out space in the bottom of his boot. He also retrieved a narrow L-shaped tube with a rubber stopper on its end and then two small disks—one a mirrored black and one of red glass. All of this, he set on the cot.
He flipped back the panel, screwed the heel back on, set the lock and went to work on the other boot. He did the same thing as with the first one: release, twist off and lift. From there he removed a second black piece of plastic—this one rectangular—along with a thimble-sized bag of some kind of dark blue sand. There was also a tiny capped bottle and what looked to be a crystalline marble. Bertram stared at the collection of objects on the cot.
“Prime example is when the Moegak military invaded right after the Jarendi Premier used a QR-260C vocal projection translator to greet their Empress,” Rollie continued. “What the Jarendi Premier had planned to say was: ‘O Great and Beneficent Empress, your fine reputation precedes you.’ But with direct translation, what everyone heard live on the Uninet broadcast was: ‘O Empress of Generous Size, you used to be a high-priced whore.’”
Rollie went on reassembling the second boot. “Runny mess that was. The interplanetary incident, the attack, the retaliation… Thousands dead on both sides and more product injury lawsuits against the translator manufacturer than you can shake an XJ-37 at.” He shook his head as he rolled the crystal into the tube and capped it with the red glass disk. Pouring the sand into the other end of it, he closed it off with the black cap. He slid the flat piece into a notch in the tube until it clicked. In a matter of seconds, he’d hooked the L-shaped piece until it snapped in place, and sprung back on a hinge mechanism located in the cylinder. Bertram noticed that from the inside, the rubber knob was now stopping up a hole that went through the side of the chamber.
Rollie moved to the cell’s sink and filled the tiny bottle with water. “Could have all been avoided with a little insight. And that’s what you’ll need if you plan to spend any time in the GCU, Ludlow: insight. Insight and preparation. Assume the worst because you’ll get the worst. Get the best, and the worst just hasn’t arrived yet. Prepare for ’em both and you’ve no regrets. But prepare for nothing, and you won’t be able to hang the blame on Destiny.” He closed up the bottle with a small, foil-like stopper and affixed it, upside down, into the hole on top of the cylinder. He delivered a chilling smile over the top of what now appeared to be some sort of gun. “Feel like a walk?”
Bertram first saw the Peace Guards’ faces with any degree of clarity as he wavered in the doorway, his knees still uncertain. Their expressions were those of wide-eyed shock at the unexpected appearance of their former prisoners …
Or perhaps their lack of eyelids gave that impression.
Either way, Rollie had brandished his homemade hand-laser long before the Guards knew to draw theirs.
“This,” he explained, “is a ZT-112G polymer-casing hydro-reactive collapsible hand-laser. It can frag the tail off a skaggett at 30 kroms. Imagine what it could do at this range.” He motioned for them to toss their holsters to the floor, and three weapons clattered onto the ground instantly. Rollie surveyed the room. “My personals. Where are they?”
“Oh!” piped up Bertram, patting his chest where the missing item wasn’t, “and my Yellow Thing!”
“And the Yellow Thing,” Rollie added. In the right mood, Rollie could even make the phrase “Yellow Thing” sound menacing.
“Your RegForce is on their way, you know,” one of the lawmen said. “We’ve contacted them.”
“Oh, have you?” said the captain, flicking his gaze to the pile of vis-u parts on the floor. “What with? Two tin cans and a very long line to Hyphiz Delta?” But by now, Rollie’s attention had drifted to a nearby cabinet. Wordlessly pressing the collapsible hand-laser into Bertram’s palm, he stepped over to investigate the cabinet’s drawers.
Bertram was bewildered to find the gun in his grasp. It was light, with a surprisingly good, solid grip. Not that Bertram knew from grips. His gun-savvy was pretty limited to video game assaults and the local amusement park shooting gallery.
The Peace Guards seemed to pick up on a certain hesitation of his, too, and their black eyes bored through him, eking out his inexperience with every second. He looked to Rollie’s back, wondering how long he’d have to hold the fort. But the captain was still busy digging through the cabinet, treating paperwork and information chips to brief moments of flight.
Bertram turned back to the Guards, greeting them brightly. “Um, hey there!” He offered his biggest, most congenial smile. “Wow, I bet you guys are damned curious to learn how we got out.”
But they were silent. There were just the dark eyes, eyes like black holes themselves, staring, drawing him in, pulling at his resolve and stretching it thin.
“Er, red was green,” Bertram explained over the barrel of the laser. His palms were sweating.
He wrenched his gaze from the Peace Guards and gave another status check on Rollie, who was now booting the bottom drawer shut and attacking a second set of cabinets. “Green was red,” Bertram went on.
The Guards exchanged glances, their lid-less eyes staring onward. One of them made a move as if to step forward, but Bertram found himself waving the gun.
“Okay, don’t push me, Sleestak,” he warned, his smile shaking away. “My head’s killing me and I have a case of spacelag like you wouldn’t believe.”
From across the room, Rollie held aloft two sealed and labeled bags, one carrying a single item and the other stuffed to the seams. “Got ’em!” He tossed the bag with the Yellow Thing to Bertram, then withdrew a hand-laser from his own extensive bag of stuff. Bertram watched in fascination as the man from Hyphiz Delta swiftly directed the laser on each of the Peace Guards’ weapons. And one by one, the weapons collapsed into puddles of liquid metal on the floor.
Then he flipped a switch in the handle and repeated the task, this time targeting the Peace Guards. Now they appeared to melt, transforming into scaly skin-sacks of organs and rubber bones, gelatinous piles left to dry out on the tile flooring.
Bertram had never seen vertebrates look more inverted. It was all so real. So vividly real. He found himself just pointing and stammering. “Oh God! Oh God, oh Lordy, oh God, Jesus, holy shit, Lord …” He knew the Deltan was a little volatile. But he had never imagined this.
“Time to haul, Ludlow,” Rollie said, and after what he’d just witnessed, Bertram wasn’t about to argue. Gagging and retching, he let himself be directed out through the front door.
They were only outside for a moment before the alien went to work fusing the door shut with that same laser. “Jesus, Rollie, holy shit, man …” He forced himself to catch his breath. His heart was doing the Pogo. “Look, I don’t want to get on your bad side here, bro, but you dissolved them into Jell-O. Isn’t that enough?”
Rollie just gave an unreassuring smile and headed for the Intergalactic Cruise Vessel impound.
“You made me into a fugitive,” Bertram said.
With the spacecraft in-flight and stabilized, the alien was busy spilling the last of his personal possessions from the bag onto the table. He did it just as calmly as if he were sifting through a box of puzzle pieces.
“Before … before we might have just gotten off on explaining your early release from prison as an oversight—some confusion—a little mistake, you know? But now, now …” Bertram shook his head. “Jail break? Totally liquefying the local police? Entombing their remains in the station?” Bertram felt like he couldn’t breathe again. Was it possible to hyperventilate during a hallucination? He didn’t know. He was so out of his league with this.
Rollie was buckling on a holster.
“Damn it, you liquefied them, Rollie. Sealed the e
vidence in the jailhouse and—” Bertram gasped, “—sweet Jesus, I covered them!” Bertram sunk into a seat. “What was I thinking? I covered them while you ransacked their file drawers.”
The captain busied himself reseating lasers into various housings, gadgets to various pockets.
“And now I’m a fugitive,” Bertram said, tossing up his hands in defeat. “Maybe it’s symbolic of running away from something, some fear. The pressure to succeed, the working world, or getting older and finally having to, I don’t know, get a mortgage and stop watching so much hockey.”
“How about life in confinement?” Rollie suggested, adding a dagger to a sheath.
Bertram frowned. How many weapons did he have, anyway? He shook his head. “The question is, what am I running away from? Until we figure that out and address it, well … I … I just don’t see this coming to a satisfactory conclusion.” Bertram looked out the hatch window. “Where are we headed?”
“To get some real questions answered,” Rollie said. “Questions for three back-stabbing Seers.”
“Rhobux-7?”
“We should be just about there,” Rollie said. “You look out that portal and you’ll see it in a minute.”
Bertram moved to the window and peered out at the fabric of space. Waited, waited, waited …
“I’m not seeing it.”
“It’ll be coming up there on the port side.”
“Sure, port.” Bertram tried to remember.
Rollie rolled his eyes. “Your left.”
Waiting, waiting … Bertram chewed absently on a thumb-nail. “What does Rhobux-7 look like again?”
Rollie growled. “Blast it, Ludlow, it’s the great big rustish planet out there plain as …” He stopped, gazing out of the portal with his eyes brightly orange and wide, an expression of total unguarded surprise that Bertram had never imagined he’d witness. The man stammered something in a language even Translachew couldn’t grasp, and darted to the cockpit.